Story Highlights

St. Cloud has a high school problem: Technical High School is long overdue for replacement, and Apollo's worn and nearly outgrown building is badly in need of renovation. Operating costs for these old, inefficient physical plants — for basic utilities and waste service — are approaching a combined $1 million annually.

District leaders are planning to make a decision this summer about the buildings' futures and are considering options that include upgrading both schools, replacing Tech, or possibly combining both student bodies into a single new school.

What's apparently not being considered is a potentially better solution: Dividing the St. Cloud high school population between three smaller buildings to improve educational outcomes and offer locations closer to where more students live.

The two high schools enroll a total of 2,700 students. Studies as far back as the 1970s have demonstrated economies of scale as schools grew toward 1,000 students. But the economic gains realized from increased efficiency in staffing and use of nonclassroom spaces began to wane as schools surpassed 1,000 students and were forced to add a second cafeteria, third gym or secondary library to accommodate higher demand at peak times.

Hitting the efficiency sweet spot is one great economic advantage to building a new school, second only to investments in sustainable design in limiting operating costs. Any future building or renovation projects should emphasize both of these factors from the outset.

Ultimately educational outcomes, not simply cost savings, should be the primary factor in facilities planning. Researchers have demonstrated time and again that educational outcomes begin to decline as schools grow large, even when economic savings continue to increase.

The long history of school consolidation in the United States has shown that larger schools can offer more diverse curricula and broader cocurricular activities, due in part to hosting the critical mass of students needed to make such options viable, at least up to a point.

But the rush toward ever-larger high schools in the 1990s and 2000s also showed diminishing educational outcomes when they grew beyond 1,200 students. Below that, students felt they belonged to a community, teachers knew the students well and class sizes remained small enough to adapt to individual instructional needs.

St. Cloud should take great care in balancing educational outcomes against prudent concern for construction and operating costs; locking the district into a large-school model for another century is almost certainly not the best path for our children.

Missing from the public debate so far has been serious discussion of a three-school model. The St. Cloud district could renovate Apollo, demolish Tech and sell off the land, and build two new, smaller, efficient, state-of-the-art schools in locations better placed to serve projected population growth.

A revitalized Apollo could serve St. Cloud's core and northern residential neighborhoods; a well-planned, sustainable renovation could make it more attractive and more efficient, especially if the student body were capped at about 1,100. New schools built to serve the populations on the south and east side of town and the west could each be designed for 950 students, with plans for future expansion if necessary.

Together the three could serve 3,000 students — 10 percent more than are presently enrolled – on the assumption that the new buildings and new programming they engendered would lure back some of the hundreds of students from the district who currently enroll elsewhere due to the poor condition and size of the existing schools.

The classic study on this topic, Valerie E. Lee and Julia B. Smith's "High School Size: Which Works Best and for Whom?" (Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 1997), is unequivocal in its findings: Smaller schools, which they define as having 700-900 students, produce better leaning outcomes for everyone and are especially effective in addressing the needs of students from minority and low socioeconomic backgrounds.

Our community would do well to keep this in mind and to recognize that bigger isn't always better when it comes to our schools.

This is the opinion of Derek Larson, who teaches History and Environmental Studies at The College of St.. Benedict/St. John's University. He welcomes your comments at twg@anderson-larson.net. His column is published the first Wednesday of the month.